The first thing she did was to pour a lot of sugar into her coffee mug, and take a good long drink.
“Just getting up?” Darryl asked. “’Cause if you don’t mind my saying so, you look like you should have stayed in bed.”
“Thanks for the kind words,” she said, putting her mug down. “How does your wife not shoot you?”
Darryl shrugged. “Our marriage is built on honesty,” he said, and Michael had to laugh.
“The weird thing is,” she said, “when I was in Chicago, and I had car alarms going off in the middle of the night, and neighbors having parties till four in the morning, I slept like a baby. Here, where the place is as silent as a grave and the nearest car is parked about a thousand miles away, I’m awake half the night.”
“You pulling your bed curtains closed?” Darryl asked.
“Not on your life,” she said, dipping some dry toast in a runny egg. “Too much like a coffin.”
“How about the blackout curtains on the window?”
She paused, chewing slowly. “Yeah, I got up to fiddle with those last night.”
“The idea,” Darryl admonished her, “is to close them before you get in bed.”
“I did, but I could have sworn…” She stopped, then went on. “I could have sworn I heard something outside, in the storm.”
Michael waited. Something in her voice told him what was coming.
“Heard what?” Darryl asked.
“A voice. Shouting.”
“Maybe it was the banshee,” Darryl said, burrowing into his plate.
“What was it shouting?” Michael asked, as casually as he could.
“Best I could make out—and the wind was pretty high—it was something like ‘Give it back.’” She shook her head and went back to her toast and eggs. “I’m starting to miss those car alarms.”
Michael could barely swallow his food, but he decided to keep his own counsel for a while.
“Which reminds me,” she said, fishing in the pocket of her overcoat and removing a blood sample in a plastic vial. “I need a full blood assay done on this.”
Darryl didn’t look thrilled. “Why am I so honored?”
“Because you’ve got all that fancy equipment in your lab.”
“Whose is it?” he asked.
“Just one of the grunts,” she said, offhandedly. “No big deal.”
“Well,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with the napkin, “as it so happens, I do have some big news of my own.”
Michael wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not.
“You are sitting, my friends, in the company of greatness. In that last set of traps, I captured a heretofore undiscovered species of fish.”
Both Michael and Charlotte suddenly gave him their full attention.
“This is for real?” Michael asked.
Darryl nodded, grinning. “Although it is closely related to the Cryothenia amphitreta, which remained undiscovered until 2006, this specimen is as yet unrecorded.”
“How can you be sure?” Charlotte asked.
“I’ve consulted the definitive sourcebook, a little tome called Fishes of the Southern Ocean, and it’s not there. Its head morphology alone is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s got a bifurcated ridge above its eyes, and a purple crest.”
“That’s fantastic,” Michael said. “What are you going to call it?”
“For the time being, I’m calling it Cryothenia—which means, ‘from the cold’—hirschii.”
“That’s modest,” Charlotte said with a laugh.
“What?” Darryl replied. “Scientists name things after themselves all the time—and it will truly piss off a guy named Dr. Edgar Montgomery back at Woods Hole.”
“Then I say go for it,” Michael said.
“Now, what I’d really like to do,” Darryl said, “is catch a few more of them fast; there might be a whole school in the vicinity. The one I’ve got I’ll need to dissect, but it’d be great to have a few spares that I could keep intact.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky,” Michael said.
“Murphy’s ordered everyone to stay on base until the storm clears, but if I can get permission to go just as far as the dive hut, I’m going to drop some more nets and traps. You’re welcome to come along—both of you. You could tell your grandchildren that you were there while history was being made.”
Charlotte blotted up some more yolk, and said, “Much as I’d like to freeze my butt off fishing, I think I’ll take a nice long nap instead.”
But Michael, jumping at the opportunity to get off the base any way he could—especially since Eleanor was off-limits—said, “I’m game. When do you want to go?”